Spotlighting Racial Bias

08.14.14 - In LaKeisha’s hometown of Atlanta, African American
women die in childbirth at a rate more than three times the national average.
Following an emergency c-section, LaKeisha experienced a brush with this
unsettling statistic when she developed a painful infection.

While post-cesarean complications are
not uncommon, inadequate follow-up care meant that LaKeisha was neither treated
for nor informed about the signs of infection. For countless women like her,
racial and socio-economic disparities in health care quality and insurance
access have made childbearing an increasingly dangerous proposition in this
country.

“There were no calls from the doctor’s
office to say, ‘How are you doing?’” recalls LaKeisha. “I sat with an infection
for two weeks. I thought it was just the pain [from the cesarean]. . . . I
remember feeling horrible.” The lingering infection traumatized LaKeisha both
physically and emotionally, especially when her financial situation forced her
to return to work earlier than planned.

LaKeisha is one of 25 women we spoke to
during the Center for Reproductive Rights’ joint effort with SisterSong Women
of Color Reproductive Justice Collective to gather firsthand accounts of
Southern Black women’s sexual and reproductive lives. The project documents the
experiences of women living in Georgia
and Mississippi—two
states with the highest rates of maternal death in the country. Analyzing their
stories has helped the Center identify key areas in which U.S. government policy is failing
to address racial and gender discrimination in the sphere of sexual and
reproductive health care.

This week, the Center and SisterSong
brought these findings before the United Nations Committee on the Elimination
of Racial Discrimination (CERD) during the committee’s periodic review of the United States.
The CERD is the UN body responsible for assessing the efforts of member states
to end racial discrimination.

In addition to testifying, the Center
submitted a shadow report intended to supplement the government’s account of actions
taken to address the Committee’s concerns from their last review, in 2008.

“These reviews allow us to spotlight
issues of racial discrimination in the U.S. and bring to light various
concerns that are not normally talked about in terms of racial discrimination,”
notes the Center’s senior human rights counsel, Katrina Anderson, who is
representing the Center at the review.

Anderson identifies specific concerns such as poor-quality care for
women of color in public hospitals, inadequate public transportation to health
facilities, and lack of coverage for preventive care as systemic issues for
which the government needs to be held accountable.

“Most people in the U.S. don't know we have a maternal mortality
rate double that of Saudi
Arabia. And those who do know about it view
it as a public health issue,” she says. “Globally, however, preventing maternal
mortality is a key human rights concern, and the international community has
developed standards to hold governments accountable for high ratios of maternal
deaths.”

Kendra, another woman we spoke to
during the joint project with SisterSong, is from Mississippi, where a disproportionately high
percentage of people of color live in poverty. In that state, there are counties
where the risk of maternal death has risen to more than 20 times the national
average—a higher maternal mortality rate than in Kenya
or Rwanda.

No surprise then that Kendra, who
became pregnant in the 12th grade after receiving virtually no sex
education, says of her community, “We really don't have a lot of good experiences
when it comes to childbirth.”

During this week’s testimony, the
Center and SisterSong are urging the CERD to question the U.S. government about
how it is addressing racial disparities in maternal mortality, especially in
the South, where states have largely rejected Medicaid expansion yet are
comprised of a disproportionate number of people of color who are unable to
afford private insurance.

Additionally, the Center hopes the CERD
will press the U.S.
about laws that exclude immigrants from being able to obtain health care benefits.
The shadow report points to Texas, where lawmakers have imposed sweeping
barriers to essential reproductive health services, essentially blocking Latinas
and immigrants in poor, rural areas such as the Rio Grande Valley from
accessing such care.

“The 136% rise in maternal deaths in
the U.S. over the past 20 years and the dramatic increase in racial disparities
is a human rights crisis, brought on to large degree by gender and racial
discrimination in the health care system,” notes Anderson. “Our hope is that
the Committee will identify how the U.S. is falling short in policy and
practice and offer recommendations for how federal and state governments can
reduce racial discrimination.”

Taking the stories
and statistics of this developing crisis to the international stage helps
ensure that the distressing experiences of women like Kendra and LeKeisha
cannot be dismissed. As with governments across the world, we aim to hold the
U.S. responsible for addressing the complex of factors—including race, gender,
and poverty—that continue to imperil the lives of millions of already
marginalized women.